Engineers at Sony are now actively working on the problems affecting the company's PS Stars reward program, with the service now having been offline for around about two weeks. Reports of user issues began appearing from 5th June, and the PS Stars icon was removed from the PlayStation mobile app shortly afterwards.
The button has now returned, but pressing it returns a simple maintenance page reading: "PlayStation Stars is currently experiencing issues. Our engineers are aware of the issue and are working on a solution."
With the service offline, it means users can't acquire any new PS Stars collectibles or earn redemption points off of their PS Store purchases — including today's new PS Store sale. These points can be traded in for monetary vouchers or full games. Some users speculated the downtime could be related to an upcoming service upgrade, since PS Stars still has no presence whatsoever on PS5, PS4 consoles themselves. However, the maintenance message from Sony very much confirms something has gone wrong on the backend.
Reddit communities have continued to prod PlayStation Support for answers, but since representatives on the other end have little insight into internal messaging and updates at Sony, they're only so much help. One claims "you won't lose any reward points" while another tells a user to wait until PS Stars is back up and running before buying anything to ensure they receive PS Stars points.
Have you been badly affected by the downtime? Let us know in the comments below.
Comments 39
I you been badly affected by the downtime. It's terrible.
Lol no, but they could revamp the whole thing while they're at it. It wasn't too user friendly or convenient to use them.
Typical Sony don’t expect it be sorted anytime soon lol
My icon has been missing for a while but it randomly got restored the other day. It's still inaccessible but seeing the icon return gives me a sliver of hope it'll return sooner rather than later.
Won't somebody think of the collectibles.
Oh no, oh dear, how can we live, how can we breathe, what now?
...nevermind.
Shows you how Sony feels about the importance of stars lol
this is going the way of little big planet
Its really bizarre its been down so long with no real response from Sony.
@sorteddan Don't care about the collectibles but i care about the £15 i've built up.
I’ve got points to the value of £20 and a Shuhei Yoshida bobble head in my stars account, I’ll be gutted if I lose them 😱
It's a shame it happened right in the middle of Days of Play.
Lots of nice collectible campaigns were popping up alongside the deals.
Perhaps someone found a way to "hack" getting points?
Would be nice if they updated it all with PS5 integration. Pipe dreams. Haha.
‘There’s an issue’
And yet when it returns I have a suspicion that the ability to get a voucher to spend in store will be gone. I think they’ve made some adjustments to the perks available and have held up making them live to get their public messaging about it right.
Call me a cynic but this feels odd.
How difficult is it for Sony to put Stars on console, I'd imagine not very difficult at all. The app just eventually puts up a needless barrier, as it's less likely to be used by gamers compared to if it were on console. Stars being on console has the potential to help with user engagement numbers too?
I read another report stating that points will still be earned in the back end, even if you can't track them...... Not sure on how true this is
@Beerheadgamer82 Maybe the reason for the issues? Trying to bring it to console, but somehow eff the whole thing up everywhere
@Smithylfc2008 yh that's what I thought last week but now this just seems like somethings gone wrong with it?
Could have really used the points to have enough for one of the games that went on sale today.
Honestly, at this rate my Plus subscription will run out before it's back (towards the end of this month), and then I bet there'll be issues to even get the points for stuff I purchased while it was down.
This only happens with Sony, the store is also very slow many times.
@itsfoz They wouldn't have scheduled to take the scheme offline right in the middle of a massive campaign just make adjustments to rewards etc; this was clearly unplanned. It's more likely either a critical error occurred or a vulnerability/exploit was found requiring it to be immediately suspended.
They cant be bothered to fix it then i cant be bothered to spend money on the store. Simple as that really 🤷
I didn’t even realise I’d been building points up until my mate me he had enough for a surprise fiver in his. Turns out I’d been sitting on £20 for a while without even knowing it! Cashed it in last week
Hopefully purchases made during the downtime get points! I bought five games in this downtime
Typical Sony. They take months longer than any other tech company to fix issues. Whoever the engineer is that is over PS Stars should be axed.
If they were updating it, fine. But don't do it during an event in which has Star challenges and items!
It is like a betting site doing upgrades during the Euros! 😂
@Shepherd_Tallon I wonder if PS Stars’ problems are related to some of the tracking for Days of Play. It seemed like they wanted to integrate some of the Days of Play missions into the app, but had to resort to external links, and I believe PS Stars went dark just around the time of the second challenge. Just complete conjecture on my part, but maybe the two are related.
Thats so embarassing. I had purchased Astros Bot and hoped for my Points.
@Amnesiac it's a fair observation.
I remember it was right after the second challenge when it died, and I've never had any problems with it before now.
Maybe that's it.
Well, if the PS5's UI is anything to go by, the engineers should be able to fix Stars by... never.
There's still things to this day that don't work properly on the PS5's UI that haven't since launch, so I wouldn't criticize anybody saying that they aren't surprised Stars is still not working.
@Ken_Kaniff They were great through the whole PS4 generation. Then the PS5 came out and it's like they either cut that staff in half or gutted it all and hired people off of Craigslist.
If the people who work on the PS5's UI are the same people that work on Stars, I'm not surprised this has happened. I still love my PS5, but it's sad that the days of having faith in things working properly most of the time and them fixing the issues in a timely manner if not went away so quickly.
@KilloWertz I completely agree. There's so many things that seem so lazy on the PS5s UI. I've wanted them to overhaul the trophy UI since launch. It looks so bad since they switched the tiles that I thought it was a placeholder when the PS5 launched, lol. I was wrong...they obviously thought that was suitable.
As long as I retroactively get the points for the purchase I made a few days ago, it's fine, whatever.
Im holding off purchases until its back. Plenty of backlog to get through and those points do add up.
That said, as many others have said, its not likely to get fixed anytime soon. What incentive do they have? Its not like its a real revenue driver. Wait 6 months and everyone, including me, will just go back to normal and they wont have to pay to support it
Don't worry guys the other crap like being able to look at trophies on your phone still works, the stuff people care about.
@Ken_Kaniff They did overhaul the actual list of each game and how many trophies you've earned at least. At launch that was horrible.
There's other things that have been broken pretty much since launch like obviously the playtime tracking off and on, and when comparing certain games with people on your friends list. Like Final Fantasy VII Remake that has multiple versions and a demo. Even though I've played it on PS4 and PS5, it will say I never played it when comparing it with somebody else. I think that made sense.
My biggest issue is the forced activity cards though. One thing the PS5 UI had going for it was how nice it looked with game art as the background for games. Now that goes away the moment you start playing a game. The fact that they never gave you the option to revert back to the original look is stupid.
We better get some type of compensation for not being able to do campaigns and spend our points
Well this sucks. Had enough points for a voucher, but guess not.
Surprised it hasn’t been reported here that Sony Rewards is shutting down. Wasn’t great but it was something to get some occasional PS credit or a free movie.
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